Ever have that sudden nightmare that you wake up from and go "Whew!"
Yeah, I had one of those while I was awake.
Last night I took a break from puttering around on the PC and got up for a bio break. I came back, and... the monitor didn't.
Restarted the monitor, and no dice.
"Okay," I thought, "the PC is in a hung state. No big deal. I'll reboot it."
After rebooting, I heard the telltale Windows startup tones, but... still nothing on the screen.
So I shut down everything and waited a minute, then tried again.
Still nothing.
I was beginning to panic, because I've seen what graphics cards cost these days, and if it was the graphics card that was gonna hurt. A LOT.
Stepping back, I decided to go ahead and lug up an old monitor that doesn't even do 1080i (it does 1024x768) but does have an HDMI port, turned it on, and then plugged in the HDMI output from the PC.
Voila! A screen!
Okay, so it was the monitor, not the graphics card. Before I began going down the rabbit hole of pricing out 32" curved monitors as a direct replacement for my current one, I decided to unplug it and let it be for a good 15 minutes. In the meantime I began perusing prices at Microcenter, and for my needs the monitor was going to cost between $200 - $300. It was doable, but obviously something in my monthly budget would have to be pushed out until October.
But first, let's try the monitor once more.
I plugged in the HDMI cable, then the power brick, and...
Whew. At least I don't have to go running to the store tomorrow at lunch.
#Blaugust2026
I've had a series of this sort of thing for the last few months. In one way, PCs are great because they're made of lots of bits and when they go wrong you can often swap a part out and they work again. In another, they're terrible because they're made of bits and any one of them can fail at any time. Not to mention how mostly it's going to end up being a software issue anyway...
ReplyDeleteThis is one reason I'm leaning more and more towards streaming services that work on multiple devices. Then if one goes down I can just carry on on another.